OpenID 2.0 Final

OpenID 2.0 is finally a released specification. The announcement by the OpenID community yesterday stated:

It’s important to remember that this has been the work of many folks not only within the OpenID community but also the OpenID Foundation, AOL, Cordance, JanRain, Microsoft, NetMesh, Six Apart, Sxip, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Verisign and Yahoo!. Microsoft was instrumental in helping with legal support and guidance combined with the insight of Sun and Yahoo! with their joint work in developing the right language. This is great news as it means that today not only is OpenID 2.0 final, but all of the contributors have sent a strong message that OpenID must be freely implementable world-wide.

Last week Google and Microsoft also showed their support of OpenID. In the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View CA, both Microsoft and Google included OpenID features in beta products. Google announced the ability to comment on Blogger blogs using OpenID and Microsoft Research announced an experimental Provider.

Here Comes Another Bubble

Via Amy Gahran.

Blogs in Plain English

Lee and Sachi LeFever on Blogs in Plain English.

Lessons Learnt on Social Software for Professional Learning

This call is also available on Ralf's blog.

The NoE PROLEARN on professional learning is preparing a final deliverable for the work package "Social Software" called "Lessons Learnt on Social Software for Professional Learning"

The rationales are to invite all the experts in the area of Technology Enhanced Professional Learning to give their lessons learnt on the use of web 2.0 and social software technologies for professional learning and to research what is the current impact on social software on European TEL industries?

* In order to conduct the research we have prepared and sent an internet based questionnaire about the formal structure, the knowledge management & HR pratices, and the leadership culture in European companies. If you haven't got an invitation for the questionnaire, please contact bachwerk[at]i5.informatik.rwth-aachen.de and you will get an email with the invitation.

* In order to have a more Web 2.0 kind of interaction I kindly ask you just to send some comments to this entry, links to your own entries about your lessons learnt, podcasts, wikis, links etc.

Google Reader as Long Tail Aggregator and Filter

Google Reader is already known as a good aggregator of the Long Tail of online content (e.g. blogs) as it makes it easy to subscribe to and manage feeds. Recently Google Reader has become a Long Tail filter as well. Steve Goldberg from Google Reader announced the newly added recommendation feature. He writes:

To help with the discovery of interesting sites to subscribe to, we just released personalized recommendations in Reader. When you visit our discovery page, you'll see quite a few feeds that we think you may find interesting. "Interesting" here is determined by what other feeds you subscribe to, as well as your Web History data, all taken into account in an automated, anonymized fashion. (To learn more about how our recommendations work, see our help article about them).

Another feature he announced is drag-and-drop support for subscriptions and folders. A nice feature indeed if someone has to deal with a big number of subscriptions.